His hand came up to her jaw, tilting her head. She made a sound against his mouth that went straight through his chest and lodged there. It was a small, broken whimper that fueled the fire in his blood.
Her fingers were in his hair and pulling, and he had both arms around her. She was pressed against him from shoulder to hip and the herb room. The morning, the study, the map with its northern ridge notation and the name written in small, careful script below it, all of it gone. The world ceased to exist outside the circle of his arms.
Nothing in the room except this. Her mouth and her hands and the small fierce sounds she made when he deepened the kiss and the way she kissed him back like she was answering aquestion she'd been sitting with for weeks. Her lips were soft and demanding, a promise and a confession all at once.
She pulled back enough to breathe. Her chest was heaving, her face flushed a deep, beautiful red.
Her forehead dropped against his. Her hands were still in his hair, not releasing. He had one hand against the back of her neck and the other flat against the small of her back. He could feel the frantic thud of her heart through her ribs, echoing his own.
They stood there for a moment with their breath tangled between them and the fire in the brazier, throwing its low light across the stone floor. The silence was no longer heavy, but charged with a terrifying, new light.
Her eyes opened. They were bright with unshed tears and a sudden, fierce heat.
Green, dark at the edge, closer than they've ever been. Her mouth was red, and her hair had come half down from its braid, and she was looking at him with a directness he felt in his sternum. The intensity of her gaze made his knees weak.
He kissed her again.
She kissed him back.
Slower this time. It was a deliberate, searching touch that made his skin feel too small for his body.
Her hands moving from his hair to the sides of his face, holding him still. She cradled his face as if it were something precious, something she intended to keep.
He let her, one hand at her waist and one at the back of her neck. Her mouth soft and deliberate, and taking its time, and it was worse than the desperate first kiss. It was considerably worse. The tenderness of it was a knife to his heart, cutting through the scar tissue.
It was the kind of kiss that meant something specific and did not pretend otherwise. It was a claim, and he felt himself surrendering to it.
He pulled back enough to breathe.
Not far. An inch, perhaps two, the distance a man allowed himself when he was trying to remember what caution felt like and finding he no longer could. Her forehead came to rest against his. Her hands were still in his hair, not releasing.
He could feel her heartbeat.
Not hear it, feel it. Through the press of her chest against his, a rapid, unguarded rhythm that matched nothing steady or controlled.
She was not managing herself. She had stopped managing herself entirely and had not noticed, and something in him recognized that with a clarity that went straight through his ribs.
He brought one hand up slowly. Not to her hair, not to her jaw. To her collarbone, just below her throat. The flat of his palm, still, simply resting. Learning the pace of her breathing through his hand the way she had learned his scar through her fingers.
She stilled. Let him.
Her eyes were open, close, the color of deep water in low light. She was looking at him without armor, without the dry, careful guard she carried everywhere, and he was close enough to see the exact moment she chose not to put it back.
She was entirely unafraid and beautiful.
The thought arrived with the force of something falling.
Not unafraid of him.
She had never been afraid of him, that he had known from a cliff ledge in the western glens. Unafraid of this. Of being seen wanting something. Of letting it show in her face and her hands and the unsteady pull of her breath.
She had walked into this room open and she had stayed open and she was still open now, every part of her present and undefended.
He had not been that in six years. He was not certain he remembered how.
Her hair fell forward around them both, red and loose, the smell of herbs and cold air and something underneath that was simply her. He turned his face into it. Stayed there a moment, his hand still at her collarbone, her heartbeat still under his palm.
Everything I care about dies.
